The Food Medic - S8 E11: TikTok therapy with Dr Julie

Episode Date: September 8, 2022

In the season 8 finale Dr Hazel is joined by TikTok sensation Dr Julie. Dr Julie is a Clinical Psychologist with over a decade of professional experience but many of you will know her from Instragram and TikTok where she shares bite-sized mental health and motivational videos online, with a combined following of more than 3.5 million people. She is also an author of The book Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? A mental health toolbox that is filled with ideas, techniques and insights to help you feel calmer, stronger and more resilient, no matter what life throws your way. This episode covers:*Condensing complex mental health issues into creative bite-sized videos *The moment Dr Julie went viral*Working as a team with her husband*Anxiety - what it is, how it manifests and what to do about it*Stress vs anxiety - how is it different?*How to better cope with stress*The issue with “I'll be happy when…” *Creating a life aligned with your values If you loved this episode make sure to give it a review, rating (hopefully 5 stars) and share it with your friends and family. Thank you to our season sponsor WHOOP. Right now, you can get your first month free when you checkout through join.whoop.com/thefoodmedic@thefoodmedic / www.thefoodmedic.co.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Hello, and welcome back to a brand new episode and the final episode of Season 8 of the Food Medic Podcast. I'm your host, as always, Dr. Hazel Wallace. I'm a medical doctor, nutritionist, author, and founder of The Food Medic. I've really enjoyed recording this season and I hope you've enjoyed listening along too. We will be taking a little break before the next season but in the meantime do let me know what topics you want covered and who you would like me to interview next. Drop us an email or find me on social under the handle The Food Medic. But today I'm joined by someone who I've been wanting to speak to for

a very long time. Dr. Julie is a clinical psychologist with over a decade of professional experience, but many of you will know her from Instagram and TikTok where she shares bite-sized mental health and motivational videos online with a combined following of over 3.5 million people. She's also author of the book, Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? A mental health toolbox that is filled with ideas, techniques, and insights to help you feel calmer, stronger, and more resilient, no matter what life throws your way. I found Dr. Julia's videos so helpful during the pandemic, just like many others. And I want to dive a little deeper into some of the topics she discusses on her page, like anxiety, stress and creating a life with meaning.

Today's podcast is brought to you by our seasoned sponsor, Whoop. Whoop 4.0 is a 24-7 digital fitness and health coach that provides actionable insights to help you recover faster, train smarter and sleep better. And unlike most other wearables in the sense that it doesn't just tell you what you've done, but it tells you what you really need to know. Now, as many of you know, I've been using my WHOOP for the last couple of years, and I'm constantly impressed by how accurately it can quantify how I'm feeling. So each morning, when you wake up, you get a recovery score from WHOOP. And this is based on your sleep and other health metrics. Now that score can help guide your day and informs you how much strain you're ready to take on. One of my favorite features is the built

in sleep coach. It lets you know how much sleep you should be getting based on your expected activity level for the following day. WHOOP can help anyone perform better. So whether you're preparing for a 5k, training for an event or just looking to build healthier habits, WHOOP can help you make smarter lifestyle decisions with data that is personalized to you. And right now, you can get your first month free when you check out through join.whoop.com slash thefoodmedic. Dr. Julie, welcome to the Food Medic podcast. Oh, thanks so much for having me. I've been really looking forward to this conversation and we did have a lot of back and forth to finally to get our diaries to match up, but

we're both here. I'd love to start by just asking you about your story like your background and and what's brought you to now author TikTok Sensation? Yeah I never really get used to that um yeah so I I'm a clinical psychologist I worked in the NHS for about 10 years and once I had two of my three children I realized I couldn't do it all not well anyway and um at the time I was sort of part-time NHS part-time private practice and I sort of started just working in private practice and I could run it around sort of school hours and things like that and what when I was doing that a lot of the people that were coming through for therapy once they had the educational aspect of therapy so once they learned a bit about how they could impact on their own mood

and their own emotional state, those kind of things, or how they could adjust their relationships, they were so raring to go and so sort of empowered by having their own tools to use day in, day out to impact on how they felt. You know, it just felt like, why should people have to pay to come and see people like me to find out that educational stuff? You know, I might not be able to give therapy to everybody, but the educational stuff can be shared as widely as possible.

So, you know, I used to just sort of harp on to my poor husband about that kind of thing. And he said, well, make it available then, put it out there somehow. Let's make a YouTube video or something. And we did a couple of terrible ones. And then at the same time, discovered TikTok. And he said, well, why don't you make some bite-sized videos, you know, 60 seconds, see what you could get in. And my initial thought was, no, I'll never be able to do it justice. But it became sort of a creative journey. It became a real challenge because we did

a few. And the response was just so, within a couple of weeks it was just huge you know people were messaging and saying this is really interesting can I ask you this or what's the next bit and what's the step by step and and so it became this sort of well we have to keep going now because people are tuning in to find out what the next thing is and um so yeah we just just kept going and it was always this challenge where with short form video, it's such an incredible way to reach so many people, but you're kind of fighting against the thumb that's ready to scroll on to the next video. So it's, well, how can I talk about quite possibly the least sexy subject there is and hold people's attention? How can we make it engaging and relatable to people so um yeah we sort of played

around with it and and you know we use lots of props and metaphors and different ways to sort of illustrate points that can be quite abstract sometimes um and yeah and here we are sort of two and a half years later um and it's about across all the platforms I think there's about four million of us that's amazing did you start your social media pages at the start of the pandemic? Was it that kind of time? Yes. So it was November 2019. So it was just about a month before we all heard, because not only were people then, you know, a couple months later all at home and, you know, checking out these new sort of video platforms and things, but also dealing with a lot. And so because that's the thing about my profiles is they've never really been, you know, about me or that kind of thing. I never had a sort of an ambition to be a public person anyway or it all started with this idea of being helpful and so I wanted each video to just have some degree

of value and helpfulness to it um so when people are on social media to then go on to a profile that's purely about mental health education and hit follow I think that says a lot about what we were all dealing with at the time yeah absolutely I was going to say that you know mental health education and hit follow. I think that says a lot about what we were all dealing with at the time. Yeah, absolutely. I was going to say that, you know, mental health was never more of a conversation like than it has been in the last couple of years. And I remember the first video that I came across that you did, and it was a coin jar about saying sorry. And I remember sharing it with my friends because that's you know something that I feel like it's a very British thing although I'm Irish it's a very Irish and British thing to say sorry for everything and I love that video but do you remember the moment

where your videos really took off or was there a moment? Do you know there was there was one particular video very very early on on tiktok that i mean i can't remember really what i was saying i think i was talking about self-sabotage behaviors and things like that and i literally just sat i got home from the gym i was looking terrible i sat down at the table in my dining room and just sort of said this thing into the phone and i didn't realize at that point that you could adjust the volume on the background music on tiktok so i put the music on and it was way too loud so people were on there on the comments saying I had to watch it three or four times to be able to hear what you were saying

so I think that probably encouraged you know enabled the video to do well because people were watching it over and over again um and and that was you know the first one that blew up was a mistake really um that's amazing you live and learn you do live and learn but you've got quite a setup now and um does your husband work with you to create the videos uh yeah so it's very much um a team thing between the two of us um and he still works full time but I sort of work on things that the psychology part of it and the scripting and stuff during the day and then after I pick the children up and we do the parent thing we put the children to bed and then we sort of make the videos in the evening in here um in our little office and it's really it's kind of nice because I bring the psychology part but

my husband sort of is very good at saying oh let's you know how you know, how can we make this engaging or what, you know, throw some ideas into the mix about, you know, how can we kind of make this a bit more wild or dramatic? And it's usually him coming up with ideas and me saying, no way, I'm not doing that. And then we kind of find some middle ground. So, yeah, it's been really nice to sort of be creative. I mean, it's not it's not been fun all the time, I must admit, you know, when that sort of the demand for constant content online is um relentless and so there are plenty of evenings where we don't really feel like being inherent and doing it but you you do and and sometimes the evenings when you least feel

like actually some really good ideas come out yeah so um yeah it's been it's been a great journey yeah I love that and I think as someone who shares health information online, I completely can empathize with the fact that like a lot of that information is not always the most sexy or what people are actually seeking out for, think that they need. So to be able to turn that on its head and deliver it in a like a really creative package is so challenging and you do it so well so it's a it's amazing to see it's really inspiring um for me as well but I would love to dive a

little bit deeper into some of the topics that you do cover both online and in your book um because I think while Instagram posts and TikToks are great, you don't really, you can't really get into the nitty gritty of some of the topics, which is why podcasts can be great also. So one of the topics you talk about a lot is anxiety. And obviously, it's a very common condition, but I don't think it's very well understood. You know, we say that we're anxious a lot. We use it in terminology every day but can you explain what anxiety actually is and how it might manifest? So I mean a lot of people are probably sort of familiar with with what we term to be anxiety and it's that it's that feeling you get

where you know some people know a lot of people notice the physical sensations first. So you'll get that kind of shortness of breath. Your heart starts pounding. You start sweating. Maybe you tremble. Your sort of breathing can get very fast and shallow. So it's a sort of kind of feeling and some people get quite lightheaded or a dry mouth. There are lots of sort of physical symptoms with it that can be really uncomfortable. But essentially, it's when your brain is constantly taking in information from the outside world and making a judgment about when you're safe and any signs that you might not be in the near future. And anything that your brain picks up on, its job is not to make you calm and happy all the time. Your brain's job is to keep you alive and keep you safe so um any sort of signs that uh you might be under threat and i

think it's really key here is also that it's not just physical threat so you get that feeling when i don't know let's say you're crossing the road and you hear a car way too close and you have that rush of adrenaline through your body and you get to the curb quicker than you ever thought you could move that's anxiety working at its best But your brain also responds to psychological threat. So, you know, years and years ago, if you were to be humiliated in your social group, and then abandoned or rejected by those people, that was a clear survival threat back then. And and and you know we didn't do so well on our own we live in groups and even now we don't do that well on our own so it's um you know we live in communities and that's the way we're supposed to live and so when there we kind of

sense um a psychological threat in a social situation for example we get the same response um and that's still our brains looking out for us. But when we get that feeling, I think it is an emotion like any other, and it's uncomfortable because it's supposed to be, right? It's supposed to be activating to get us to do something with it, do something about it. But in today's society, we don't often do that. You know, we try to sit still and be quiet and carry on. um and you know we don't necessarily um activate in the way that that emotion so you know if you're looking at the kind of fight or flight response your your body is gearing up to either fight off a threat or run away from it

really quickly and so um if you don't use all of the the fuel that your body has allocated for this response, it's just sitting there. And then we kind of get those, you know, the sort of trembling muscles and then the aches and headaches and those kind of things. So it becomes really uncomfortable. But I think once we understand what that response is about and what it requires of us, we can then work with it. And then it doesn't have to become something that we dread or that we don't know how to cope with. Because there are certain things like exercise, for example, that can help hugely with anxiety.

Or even just a kind of stressful day where you've had pockets of anxiety, you can feel exhausted at the end of the day. But actually, if you did some even low level exercise, that does help your body to kind of process all of the, you know, stress hormones and everything that's kind of built up in your body to be able to bring you back down to calm and enable you to do things like sleep. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, I'm someone who's quite anxious or when I was in my early 20s, I was diagnosed with anxiety and I feel like understanding it has allowed me to like not rule my life. But having moments where I'm even positive moments that are just highly stressful. so like launching a book, I've just moved house,

I feel my anxiety creeping in a bit more. For people who are the same and can feel that kind of raising its head and they know it's kind of going to get them when they least expect it, what advice do you have to try keep it at bay so it's not causing those symptoms that are keeping you up at night or making you have a panic attack or kind of taking control of your body. Yeah I think it's probably two things that work for me and it's that always making sure that the basics are there so by basics I mean that you know the sort of fundamental core is sort of the chapters of your book really isn't it around you know good sleep

having a good social connections a good routine eating well exercise all of those things if we have a good routine with all of those things in it that is a really good basis because we it's the sort of foundations of good mental health so not only are you preventing some of those real spikes in anxiety, but you're also going to help yourself to sort of bring it down and recover from it when you have it. But also kind of shifting our relationship with anxiety as a feeling so that it doesn't have to make your life choices for you. Like yourself, I have sort of similar experience

in a sense that I didn't, so I didn't sort of ever have ambitions to be a public person, but by doing this sort of thing that felt like a short-term project, it's led me to lots of new experiences that I never really anticipated having, you know, going on the radio a lot,

going on live TV and all of these things that induce a sort of quite a heightened level of stress within me and there's a couple times when i've sort of woken up in a in a hotel room london about to go on tv thinking why am i why am i putting myself through this and actually then i can quickly remind myself why because i have this clear sort of mission for myself that that if i can spread, you know, I've had such wonderful feedback from people who are finding this educational material really helpful, that it became a great mission for me to sort of spread that as far and wide as possible.

So if something is in line with the mission, I know I can tolerate a level of stress in order to do that. And, and I guess also about kind of acknowledging that I can, I can feel that way. And when I start to feel anxious before I do something, it's not holding me back. It's actually my body preparing to bring its A game. You know, it's my body preparing to help me perform. And if I wasn't fully alert and unable to sort of focus, then I wouldn't do as well as if I had, you know, that level of stress there. So I think shifting my relationship with anxiety and all sorts of uncomfortable feelings as well. experience them and soothe our way through them, as opposed to try and block them out, it really changes the game. Because, you know, I don't, no one goes through life not feeling anxious. And, you know, even if you're avoiding anxiety all the time, you end up feeling it anyway. But if you change your relationship with it, and you're willing to carry it with you on a meaningful path, then it really shifts the game, I think.

Yeah, I think that's a really good mindset one of the things I talk about in in my own book is how anxiety and depression is twice as likely to be diagnosed in a woman than a man why do you think women are more susceptible to internalizing disorders like anxiety? Oh gosh I mean it's probably a huge question isn't it and at this point i'd love to sort of get hold of more of the data on that i guess because you know the i guess there's different factors aren't there women are more likely to um go and and seek help and and then get a diagnosis um there's a huge stigma for men in terms of even beginning to seek that help, let alone accepting a diagnosis or then sharing that in some sort of self-report data. I think also, you know, in depending on the sort of the different cultures and societies and areas that women live in, they're not always in an equal society or in a position of control over their own lives or um financial security

um you know there are lots of um lots of single parents are women who are you know having to bring up children and fight for um you know financial security at the same time and those sorts of situations um would be strange if there weren't bouts of anxiety or depression along the way. I don't think there's one specific answer, but there's probably a combination of, I don't know, I guess, you know, you might have some ideas around it as well. Yeah, I think you're right in that it's very wrapped up with not just like biology, but also like cultural and social norms between men and women. So I think on a biological level, there seems to be these vulnerable periods in a woman's life premenstrually around pregnancy and postnatally and then into the menopause where she's more susceptible to having anxiety. So I think hormones and biology are to play and how women respond to stress seems to be different on a physiological level.

But then, yeah, like women tend to be more primary caregivers. They're thinking about more people, not just themselves. And I think also what we consider is normal for a man and a woman. So like women feel like they should respond in a certain way or men should respond in another way so maybe that's why men are more likely to die by suicide engage in drug and alcohol abuse when it comes to mental health whereas women are more likely to experience anxiety and depression so i think it's like a very complex web from my interpretation of the research um yeah i think it's it's it's important to

that it's not just women that men experience it too and that we talk about it because you're so right and that women are more likely to seek out help for a mental health condition than a man is um but i just find it so interesting in how men and women experience mental health slightly differently. And certainly in the recent, an interesting piece of research showed how women are more likely to respond to stress with a sort of tend and befriend response. So they will, they will reach out to other people. And actually, that's a huge positive and that ability to seek good quality social support and share what you're going through the process of putting something into language whether you're talking to someone someone writing to them whatever it is if you're using language to put how you feel into words that's a really positive coping strategy. Yeah, I completely agree.

And we talked about stress a little bit there, but just to make it really clear, what's the difference between stress and anxiety? So I talk about this in the book where really it's about how we conceptualize it. So we have that one threat response, right? We have that one system and we conceptualize the feelings differently depending on the situation. So we'll talk about anxiety in a more sort of threatening situation.

So if there was, let's say, I'm going to use this example of, let's say you have a short lunch break and you've got to post something. So you run to the post office and you've got just enough time and then you get there and there's a huge queue. And as you're stood in the queue, you start to feel that rush of sort of increased level of alertness, that sort of stress feeling, your heart starts pounding and you're starting to think, oh God, I'm not going to get back to this meeting in time. What's going to happen? And I guess you would conceptualize that as a stressful experience if, say, you were worried about being late for your meeting because, you know, your role or your ability to do that role, or you felt that you would be humiliated, or your boss has been trying to find a way to get rid of you for ages. And so you saw it as a real threat to your livelihood, then you might experience that more as a fear or anxiety response. It's all part of that same biological, you know, we've only got the one system, but we just sort of conceptualize it differently. And we use different words to describe the

experience to help others understand what we mean, you know, but fear response tend to be based around sort of a threat, whereas stress tends to be that we've got more to handle than we really sort of have time for. And it's that we've got more to handle than we really sort of have time for and it's it's overwhelming the system that kind of thing um so and i think it doesn't really matter with all emotions and experiences it doesn't really matter if you use a label that matches the label that other people use anyway. So, I mean, there's a, a great concept called emotion granularity. And it's this idea that if you, if you can just find words to describe how you feel, that goes a really long way to helping you process those emotions in a healthy way.

And it doesn't matter if those words mean anything to anybody else. If you're using them in a journal, for example, and you're saying, oh, that feeling that feeling when and you know and you could use words from other languages if you can't find a word in your language or whatever that is but just that process of putting it into language and using that is a really helpful way to begin to sort of process emotion healthily. Yeah that's really great advice and I think also when we talk about stress, we often talk about it as kind of a very binary negative term. But a little bit of stress can be good for us, right? Yeah, for sure. I mean, stress is not the enemy and it helps us to perform.

And like we said before, you start to get that feeling just before I'll do something like go on TV or something, I'll feel that sort of heart pounding. But I know that that is my body preparing to get the job done and be alert. And I need that. Otherwise, I wouldn't be as good at it. And so if we kind of make friends with stress in that way and understand that it's helping us to perform. But it's a system that if we understand how it works, we can work with it. So I love the concept of stress being like a bank account. So, you know, we said earlier, your brain is constantly taking information from

the outside world. And your brain is making a judgment about where to allocate these finite resources of energy. And so, I don't know, let's say you're, you know, you're dehydrating and there's a bottle of water 30 meters away from you. Your brain will make a judgment about whether it's worth the energy for you to get up and go and get that bottle of water. And so if it judges, you know, the situation to be worth it, then you will get a little enough stress in your system to be able to go and move and seek that resource. And so that's, you know, stress working well. And what it gets back is hydration, right, which is good, that keeps you going and replenishes. So every time you exert and use that stress response, your body wants something back in terms of nutrition, social connection, rest and replenishment, all of those things that help us to sort of lean out of

stress so that we can lean back in later. But if we don't replenish, if we don't give something back to the system, it's a bit like taking cash out of a bank account and never putting any back in. There's only so long you can do that for before you're running on empty. And that's when we talk about, you know, concepts like burnout, where people are sort of emotionally exhausted, not sleeping, and then, happening like what's your advice there for people who are you know in very stressful jobs which most people are and some people have kids on top of that or other responsibilities if you can't run away from the stressor like how can you prevent it causing you to burn out yeah and I think I think this is key because a lot of the advice used to be you know eliminate stress just get rid of it and and it's like yeah you know tell that to the

mom who's holding down two jobs to keep a roof over her kids heads or you know the person who's waiting for some big results from the doctor and has no idea what next year is going to look like for them or, you know, anything like that. We can't choose all of the stress. Stress is a part of life. It's the response we have to the demands that are placed on us. So we can't take it all away. But what we can do is understand the system and what it needs in order to function well. So we can use stress to our advantage if we are putting something back into the system. So, you know, when you're busy and you're a parent or you're working or both or you've got lots going on,

it's working out how can I find small ways to replenish. So it doesn't mean, you know, working yourself to the absolute bones, knowing that you're going to go on a retreat at the end of the year for a week, that's not really how the system works. And you're probably going to get sick when you when you go because you're everything kind of calms down very quickly. But if you find small ways to replenish each day, or each week, then that's going to help you to kind of sustain it. And I don't mean by, you know, getting up at 5am and meditating or, you know, those kind of things. You don't have to do anything that isn't sustainable for you. It's finding small ways. So let's say, I don't know, let's say you

have 15 minutes between meetings and normally you would go and check your email, just get a few things done. What if you were to take that 15 minutes minutes that sort of in-between moment back and use it to lean out from stress so maybe you just you know leave your phone on the side and you go walk around the block and just you know look at the horizon or maybe listen to some music or maybe you go and sit in your car recline the seat and just close your eyes for 10 of those 15 minutes so you're truly you know um i mean yoga nidra is a great way to, I mean, there's lots of research on this now about how sort of short moments or sort of periods of, you know, 20 minutes, half an hour

can really help to sort of calm stress and anxiety. So they don't have to be, you know, an hour of meditation. It can be these pockets of time that help you to just decompress, calm the body so that and it replenishes quickly and you really we really get it credit for um to help you to then lean back into the next stress and you would then I think go back into that next meeting um with more energy more vitality and a better performance than if you were just you know hacking away emails in between meetings yeah it's like shaking it off in between and closing that stress cycle.

One of the chapters in your book that I really enjoyed was on the meaning of life. And you talk a lot about the mentality of I'll be happy when. And I have definitely in the past been one of those people, definitely in my early 20s before I kind of really knew what I wanted to do or who I wanted to be who I wanted to be with and it was always I'll be happy when I have x or I'm doing x and I think I still hear a lot of people around me have that mentality whether it's you know getting the job or getting engaged or getting the house what's the problem with that mentality do you think I think it's okay to look towards things

and have things to to focus on and progress towards because I think that is a big part of happiness is having that that sense of meaning and purpose. But, yeah, sort of imagining that everything will be okay when and I will be happy when is not sort of realistic or helpful. Often, I think people often realise once they achieve goals that it's not all it's cracked up to be. You know, it's a sort of you realize that the the moment was really the process of doing it um and and the magic's in the process and and that that once you reach your goal sometimes that can be a bit um uh sort of decompressing in itself um and and so i

think the sort of values work in the book is really saying you know rather than getting into this sort of happiness trap where we try to chase this idea that I could be in a place where I'm just happy all the time and I'm fully okay with me and and actually I don't know any people that are like that but it's it's focusing okay, if I have clarity on my own values, so what really matters to me, not what I want to happen to me or what I want to have or obtain, but who I want to be, how I want to face good times, how I want to face bad times, what kind of sister do I want to be? What kind of parent do I want to

be? What kind of colleague or entrepreneur or what kind of contribution do I want to make to my community or my neighbors or my, you know, wider society or all of those things. So you can kind of really break that down and get real clarity on how I want to be living. And then you get something to measure yourself against that isn't this goal, that goal, that goal, which once you've achieved them, they disappear. And they, you know, the shine comes off them pretty quick. But if, you know, if your aim is always to, let's say, you know, you have all these different exams you're going to do, but your value is lifelong learning. So you know that along that sort of path, that value of lifelong learning

and always being curious, that you're going to do little exams and tests along the way because you're challenging yourself. Then whether you pass or fail an exam is less devastating to your sense of self-worth because actually what all you're doing is you're living in line with,

I'm constantly going to learn. And so you can learn more easily from failure and things like that but also you're not then chasing this this false idea this lie that says as long as you get enough of this and you do enough of that and you're more like this then you'll just be okay it just you know it just doesn't work like that yeah and I think you're right in that to enjoy the process because sometimes you can get so wrapped up in the end goal that you just don't allow yourself to enjoy it or you don't feel like you deserve happiness until you've achieved x y and z and one of the things I spoke to about with one of my girlfriends when we were both single was we were not waiting for anyone else to give us that happiness so it was like go on

holidays by yourself it's absolutely fine it may not seem like it's normal but it's why are we waiting to be in a relationship to have that happiness or to get a mortgage or to do those things and that's just one example of how those things can manifest but I've definitely done it as as someone who's been a trainee medic and think I just need to get to this next stage and then my life will be better and I think then you're almost wishing away all the good and the bad times but that's all part of the process yeah absolutely and and and that's a really great example isn't it that it's it's okay to acknowledge that I would like a life partner and and I'm going to search for that person or the right person um and I'm also going to make the most of my life now before I find them. So it's sort of it's OK to hold both.

I think a lot of the time we're sort of pushed into these dichotomies, aren't we? That I either need to be, you know, completely OK with being single and not looking for anyone and closing myself off. Or I'm, you know, in this sort of desperate search for someone who's going to make me happy. We don't have to be either of those we can be a good you know sort of balanced sort of situation where we understand you know we live in the moment but we also work towards the future yeah yeah absolutely I love that um and you talked a little bit about like values and creating life with meaning um which I think is one of the chapters in your book what do you mean like how does someone find out what their values are if they're really struggling to identify what what

they are yeah so um i've included a few different um exercises in the book that we use in um acceptance and commitment therapy actually and and some of them you can spend longer on than others um so some of them are sort of literally just splitting a page up into like a grid and you you put different areas of your life into each box so you might have um i don't know faith or health or family relationships or intimate relationships parenting um learning, whatever those things are, career, all of those sorts of things, you can kind of split it up into the different aspects of your life. And then you take each one and you just ask yourself certain questions around what kind of person do I want to be in this area of my life?

What matters the most to me? So, you know, if I was thinking about, I don't know, parenting, for example, I did, I mean, I do these quite regularly. So I do sort of a fairly regular values check-ins. I did one quite recently in my own supervision session. And I think in like parenting, I had things like, so sometimes it's just a word or a bullet point. And I had like calm, patience, presence, loving, just odd words that just for me, kind of zone me into how I want to respond to situations as a parent in that area of my life. These are the sort of words that I want to hold on to, that I can always steer back towards if I feel like I'm steering away from them.

They become kind of like signposts and they're different from goals because you never fully achieve them. They're never complete. So a goal is something like an exam where you aim to pass the exam and once you do, it's it's done whereas a value is like a pathway that lasts for your whole life and you always try to stay close to it and life will pull you away from that because life does that right it pulls you in different directions and says this matters and this matters and this matters but by having clarity on what matters to you you can notice when you've been pulled off in a different direction and steer back in in the direction of your values so um often i will get sort of um the chance to rate it so you once you've got your

little words that your values um let's say in my sort of work life i always put enthusiasm in there it's just a word that kind of really resonates with me that um i want to be enthusiastic in whatever i'm sort of applying myself to at the time and i can rate okay how important is that to me maybe it's 10 out of 10 really important the most important thing and on the same scale of naught to 10 how do how much do i feel i'm living in line with that value at the moment and if i put um two out of ten then there's a really clear discrepancy there. OK, this thing, this value is really important to me.

But for some reason at the moment, I'm not living in line with it. What are the hurdles? What's blocking that? What has steered me in a different direction? So it doesn't become a tool for self-criticism, but more one of curiosity to say, OK, where's life pulling me? And why am I far away from this thing that clearly is so important to me. And then you can start to kind of make small adjustments that steer you back in that direction. And I think often that happens, you know, when people come to therapy, and they don't know really what the problem is, they can't really put their finger on it, they just feel a

bit lost or feel that things sort of are lacking in that meaning. And often, it's because they've become sort of disconnected from their own values and what matters to them. Maybe because they're putting everybody else first a lot of the time, or, you know, there's demands that have been placed on them that mean they've been pulled away from things that they value. And getting clarity on that can be so powerful. Yeah, I completely agree.

I feel like I don't practice that enough. But recently I did have a moment where I was feeling a bit out of sorts with my professional life. And although everything on the outset looks really positive and great, and I'm doing things that I really want to do, there was something that wasn't quite missing. And so going back to the whiteboard, and I communicated to my partner about it, and he was like, let's get out the markers and your whiteboard

and go through all your values. And it helped me really identify the one little thing that was missing that was making me feel satisfied in the work I was doing. But I wouldn't have got there unless I went back to that first step, which is what are my values and what makes, what is my, like, makes me feel like I'm working towards my purpose. Yeah, absolutely. And it's so good to do on a sort of fairly regular basis in the sense that, you know, values change over time as well, don't they? And, you know, my values as a 20 year old were completely different to what they were as a 30

year old. You know, once I had children, for example, they kind of flipped inside out and back to front overnight. And those sorts of things happen depending on where you are in your life at that point. And so it's okay to just keep checking back in and seeing what seems to matter at this point in my journey and my maturity and all those sorts of things. And because I think if we just have clarity on it then we can just adjust our direction you know yeah that's that's absolutely it so I'd love to finish the podcast with three questions that we ask every guest um the first

one is what's your number one takeaway that you'd like people to take from this episode oh um no matter how you're feeling and how alone you might feel there is always a way through there I mean I honestly I in my work as a psychologist um and particularly in the NHS I've worked with people um have been very, very poorly. And you couldn't imagine people coming back from those places. And they did. And, you know, I've seen people recover from really deep, dark places. And it takes time and it takes effort. But it's absolutely worth it.

And so I'd say anyone who is sort of struggling with their mental health in any way, there are so many tools out there that work. And that's really what, you know, what the book's been about is sort of sharing some of that and some of this sort of arsenal of tools that can help you. We can't stop life throwing terrible things at us, but we can arm ourselves with tools to help us get through it. And once we learn some of those those they're in your toolbox for life no one can take that away from you I would say you know anyone who's struggling educate

yourself and get some support because there is yeah there's always a way through yeah I love that message and the second question is what's the most important lesson that you've learned over your career so far so a little bit different oh um probably uh consistency over intensity I would say um you know we started this project and and I honestly believed it was going to be one of those little side projects you do for a while and then it fizzles out and it became that thing you did once and it really didn't happen that way so when we were doing this project it felt like something that was going to stop so we were doing it with such intensity felt like something that was going to stop. So we were doing it with such intensity because we felt that it was going to end at any point, you know, any day soon.

And we're now sort of two and a half years in. So you realise you have to kind of switch to consistency in order to make something sustainable. And I think with any life change that applies to, you know, go for small steps that you will be able to maintain you know this time next year over some big dramatic change that's going to collapse and then make you feel hopeless that about starting it again yeah it's a marathon not a sprint and the last one is what's your motto in life if you have one or any phrase that you love that you live by I love I don't know who

said it first but you know the sort of I've heard it a lot sort of online uh where people say you know you can do hard things I think that's probably a quote that always sort of stuck in my head because I perhaps have that sort of natural tendency to um shut down and avoid you know and just sort of uh step back And this whole last couple of years has challenged all of that for me. And I know that I can feel uncomfortable and step forward. And actually, that's transformed my life. If I can kind of feel uncomfortable and drive forward, it makes me feel incredibly strong and confident and um like I sort of have control over my own path yeah I agree I have a friend who who loves that phrase Adrienne Herbert

she's um a podcaster of the power hour and when I'm going through challenging time she always texts me and she's like Hazel you can do hard things because I'm like I don't know if I can do it and I it's such a it's such a short simple phrase but you can you can do hard things. Because I'm like, I don't know if I can do it. And it's such a short, simple phrase, but you can, you can do it. It's just like you're doubting yourself. And sometimes you just need to back yourself and say things like that. She's a massive inspiration, actually. I love her. And I chatted to her on her podcast and then immediately went off for a run because I was so inspired by all yes let's go and exercise let's do this she's full of energy full of energy and so positive it's it's great it's so infectious I'm sure lots of people already follow you online but if they don't where can they find you um so I'm just uh Dr Julie on Instagram and YouTube. I think on TikTok I'm Dr. Julie Smith.

But yeah, I'm across platforms. So yes, I think if you type in Dr. Julie, I'll probably appear somewhere. And your book is? Humiliating myself online. No, they're fantastic. And your book's available everywhere. Yeah, why has nobody told me this before?

I love that. Thank you so much for giving us your time today. I'm so glad that we made it work. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm sorry I couldn't come all the way up to London. It's been, but it's so nice that we get to chat properly because I've loved your content forever.

So it's been really inspiring for me. Amazing. Well, hopefully we'll see each other in real life sometimes. Yes. Yes. Okay, everyone. That was our final episode. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed recording it

if you did enjoy it you know what to do leave us a review a rating hopefully five stars and share it with someone you know will love it too that's all from me I'll see you on the next season